There's a particular kind of British pop joy that arrives fully formed, glitter first, and asks no permission — and "Heels" by LJ & The Ray Band struts through the door like it already owns the place. This is a record that understands something too many of its po-faced contemporaries have forgotten: that pop music's first duty is to make you feel ten feet tall in shoes you can barely walk in.

Bondi duo M & J have spent their career trading in gentle, sun-bleached acoustic sketches, the sonic equivalent of a flat white on a quiet balcony. Which makes "she's COSMIC light" such a startling, thrilling swerve. Gone is the languid strum; in its place, a pulsing, four-on-the-floor dance anthem that sounds like it was built for 2am rather than sunrise — though, fittingly, sunrise is exactly where it began.

Fifteen years is a long time to sit on a secret. Long enough for a city to rebuild itself twice over, for a ballerina's slippers to gather dust in someone else's memory, for the person who wrote a song to become, quietly and without ceremony, a stranger to the boy who wrote it. That gap — the one between London and Thailand, between the version of Shivers who fell for a dancer's late-night confessions and the version who finally pressed record thousands of miles away — is the whole engine of this record. You can hear the years in it. Not as nostalgia, which is cheap and always a little dishonest, but as distance: the kind that only comes from actually living the thing you once merely wondered about.

Writing convincingly about pleasure is a harder trick than writing about heartbreak. Misery hands a songwriter its own scaffolding — the minor key, the slowed tempo, the lyric that trails off into silence. Joy has to build its own architecture from nothing, and most attempts collapse into syrup within thirty seconds. Which is why the 2026 remaster of "Feel Like This" deserves a longer look than a single spin on the radio would suggest: this is a record that understands exactly how much sugar a summer song can carry before it curdles, and stops just short of the line.

Songwriters who dare to rhyme "colonial" with anything at all deserve applause before the needle even drops, and Last Night Watchman — the recording alias of a Herefordshire-based veteran of Birmingham's indie underground — clears that bar and keeps climbing. *Old Blighty*, the title track and centrepiece of this new EP, takes its cue from the toppling of Edward Colston's statue in Bristol, and turns a moment of street theatre into something far more durable: a genuinely unsettled meditation on inheritance, guilt and the stories a nation tells itself to sleep at night.